Fair Warning: a latte levy, war and marriage, and love and hate
Hello and happy new year!
For my part, my first project of the year is (kinda) done. I made some more data jewellery which I’m pretty happy with, though lots of improvement is needed.
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On the home front
CapX has tried to explain Britain’s housing crisis in 14 charts. “In London, the affordability ratio is now over 12 times salary — which given that banks will only lend five times salary means it’s effectively impossible for normal people to buy houses.”
Damian Green resigned just before Christmas, so Chris Hanretty looked at how fast Theresa May is losing ministers, and whether this is unusual or not. Here, you can see how her cabinet losses stack up against other recent governments:
MPs are calling for a so-called Latte Levy on disposable coffee cups in a bid to try and cut down the amount of waste produced. The BBC has some nice statistics in there — most striking for me is that there are 2.5 billion disposable cups thrown away every year. That is crazy (and I am part of the problem — but hopefully not so much this year!)
Over the pond
Just before Christmas The Guardian did this amazing piece about how US cities give homeless people one-way bus tickets to get rid of them… But until now no one really knew what happened to them. The piece is visually gripping, at least on desktop, combining data with first-hand accounts and videos.
FiveThirtyEight staff are trying to live more scientific lives this year, and questioning their own assumptions and habits to see if they are backed by science. Chadwick Matlin found that, although he was hugely sceptical of mindfulness, it actually does seem to help people, and scientific studies show that.
The Pudding has looked at things that people love (puppies) and hate (drain hair), and drilled down into how hates/loves vary by city. My favourite thing is these graphs which show how your feelings towards something change as you get older:
Odds and ends
The Economist says 2017 was the safest year on record for commercial passenger flights. Yes, that is exactly what Trump was bizarrely trying to claim credit for. Because of course, he has full control over all flights globally. Duh.
John Young has passed away aged 87. The number of people alive who have walked on the moon has gotten smaller once more:
World War One changed marriage patterns in Europe. Interesting quick read about how the war changed the age composition of new marriages and the age at which people married.
More than 3,100 migrants died crossing the Mediterranean in 2017. It is such a shame that this is rarely talked about nowadays — it was discussed frequently a couple of years ago, and in fact I remember writing about it in 2014. I just haven’t heard much since! Awful.
Bad chart of the week
I genuinely have no idea where this has come from (other than Twitter), but it’s basically an assault on the eyes for multiple reasons.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you like this newsletter, please forward it to people, encourage friends to subscribe to it, or buy me a coffee to show your appreciation. I’m on Twitter @SophieWarnes.
